A new patent lawsuit takes aim at a number of major technology companies, including Apple, HTC and Nokia, over a patent related to selecting interactive content with a double-click or double-tap.

Hopewell Culture and Design this month sued the companies claiming violation of U.S. Patent No. 7,171,625, entitled "Double-Clicking a Point-and-Click User Interface Apparatus to Enable a New Interaction with Content represented by an Active Visual Display Element." The patent was first filed for ownership in 2002 by assignee Actify, Inc., based in San Francisco, Calif.

The patents notes that double-clicking has been a feature of computers for some time, but it "has not been used to effect user input to a Web browser that uniquely corresponds to the double-click input."

With regard to Apple, Hopewell believes the company's mobile devices are in violation of the '625 patent. Specifically named in the suit are the iPhone and iPad, which it says have software that allows a user to "double click or double tap a visual element representing interactive content and interact with a second version of the interactive content."

Aside from naming the iPhone and iPad, the lawsuit makes no mention of what about iOS in particular it believes is in violation of its patent.

Also named in the suit is Adobe, as Hopewell hopes to prove to a court that its Adobe Reader software is in violation of the '625 patent. From HTC, the Droid Eris, Droid Incredible, Hero and EVO smartphones are specifically listed.

Also a target of the lawsuit is Finnish handset maker Nokia, as Hopewell believes its mobile devices, including the N900 and N97 are in violation of the cited patent. The remaining defendants in the suit are LG Electronics, Motorola, browser maker Opera, Palm, Quickoffice, and Samsung.

Hopewell aims to receive "adequate" damages from the numerous technology companies it is targeting. The lawsuit was filed in a U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Texas, a region known for favorable outcomes in patent lawsuits.

A new patent lawsuit takes aim at a number of major technology companies, including Apple, HTC and Nokia, over a patent related to selecting interactive content with a double-click or double-tap....

This sounds like the "inventor" of the double-click is trying to extend it to the double-tap, so he can get paid all over again. Shameless.

It clearly doesn't apply. The title alone: "Double-Clicking a Point-and-Click User Interface Apparatus to Enable a New Interaction with Content represented by an Active Visual Display Element."Implies an "apparatus" (mouse) with which you "click." Tapping with your finger instead of a mouse is entirely different.

Only this particular court (Texas ), would have even entertained the case at all.

Hopewell Culture and Design this month sued the companies claiming violation of U.S. Patent No. 7,171,625, entitled "Double-Clicking a Point-and-Click User Interface Apparatus to Enable a New Interaction with Content represented by an Active Visual Display Element." The patent was first filed for ownership in 2002 by assignee Actify, Inc., based in San Francisco, Calif.

Hopewell aims to receive "adequate" damages from the numerous technology companies it is targeting. The lawsuit was filed in a U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Texas, a region known for favorable outcomes in patent lawsuits.

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Not again...

Agreed. Both companies are based in California, and the suit is filed in Texas? That's a signature mark of a patent troll right there. Another: If you don't have one of the top three hits pointing to their site on a search engine for the organization. Any organization that can afford to pursue in court should have web site. The top ten hits I found were concerning this and other lawsuits.

How could the US patent office grant such duplicate idea? Double-clicking on an icon to initiate an action is an idea already implemented more than twenty five years ago by Apple. I wonder what Steve Jobs will react to such lawsuit.

Since this was invented by Xerox way before 2002 this had better be thrown out. This is Marshall, Texas though... When will national cases have a national jury? A small pool of jurors in a remote area have way too much power. It is a conflict of interest because they award huge payouts to get the lawyers to come to their town and use their services (airports, hotels, shops, etc.).

Someone needs to get a patent for patent trolling so they can sue all these bastards. They are immune to the reasons big companies don't usually sue each other because they don't make anything so they can't be counter sued. Most of these companies acquire the patents from another company, go to a court that doesn't care about the validity of patents (they just blindly enforce them with enormous payouts), sue everyone they can, then pocket the money and close up shop. They normally buy overly generic patents that should never have been granted in the first place so they can sue the largest number of companies.

According to an article linked on the Wikipedia Marshall Court House page, most of the lawyers involved in these patent trolling cases are former ambulance chasers that needed a new line of work after Texas put limits on medical malpractice payouts.

Whichever patent office employee approved this patent should be fired. In it's most basic implementation, this is no different than double-clicking a folder in the Finder and then "interacting" with the contents of that folder. Double-clicking an interface element to then interact in another way with the data that element represents (whether it be Finder folder contents, a Word document, a graph of Quicken data that you can drill into for more details, etc) goes all the way back to the Xerox prototype systems that lead to the Macintosh, easily predating this patent.

Read the patent, and it will become clear that it should have never been issued in the first place. That is, if you can get past the massive amounts of rudimentary UI gobbledygook they used to obfuscate the fact that they didn't invent anything new.

This sounds like the "inventor" of the double-click is trying to extend it to the double-tap, so he can get paid all over again. Shameless.

It clearly doesn't apply. The title alone: "Double-Clicking a Point-and-Click User Interface Apparatus to Enable a New Interaction with Content represented by an Active Visual Display Element."Implies an "apparatus" (mouse) with which you "click." Tapping with your finger instead of a mouse is entirely different.

Only this particular court (Texas ), would have even entertained the case at all.

Another troll happy company looking for an easy payday, off the sweat of a real company.

But I believe they may not be looking at the double tap, but rather the use of double clicking the home button to get to active applications? Still useless, as this has been around since Xerox, but actually utilized by the first consumer PC's via the Lisa/Apple II.

This sounds like the "inventor" of the double-click is trying to extend it to the double-tap, so he can get paid all over again. Shameless.

It clearly doesn't apply. The title alone: "Double-Clicking a Point-and-Click User Interface Apparatus to Enable a New Interaction with Content represented by an Active Visual Display Element."Implies an "apparatus" (mouse) with which you "click." Tapping with your finger instead of a mouse is entirely different.

Only this particular court (Texas ), would have even entertained the case at all.

Time for Sol to change back to is previous footer

From Apple ][ - to new Mac Pro I've owned them all.Long on AAPL so biased"Google doesn't sell you anything, Google just sells you!"

This sounds like the "inventor" of the double-click is trying to extend it to the double-tap, so he can get paid all over again. Shameless.

It clearly doesn't apply. The title alone: "Double-Clicking a Point-and-Click User Interface Apparatus to Enable a New Interaction with Content represented by an Active Visual Display Element."Implies an "apparatus" (mouse) with which you "click." Tapping with your finger instead of a mouse is entirely different.

Only this particular court (Texas ), would have even entertained the case at all.

I would think that the real issue is not that we're dealing with fingers, but that there are no double taps to interact with a web user interface element on the iOS platform. Double tap to zoom is an interaction with the viewport window, not an interface element (I don't believe that web site developers can write an interface element that responds to double tap on iOS, since the browser would intercept those events to treat them as a zoom request from the user).

You have to be fscking kidding me! Some PTO examiners need to get fired. How do you fix this broken system?!

If only the losers of patent trolling had to pay costs, they wouldn't lodge totally groundless claims. As it is, it only costs a few thousand dollars to get into it with the possibility of payouts in the hundreds of thousands or even millions. They can lose 99 out of 100 cases and the last one will pay for all the others with profit left over. If trolls' costs went up by tens of thousands of dollars, they'd hold fire.

ondblclick is a javascript event handler that can do whatever a programmer wants to do with a double click, including interacting with a visual object to change its appearance etc. So who do you sue for that?

When I first touched a Mac, you double-clicked to open an application. A single click on a page inserted the cursor on that page. The IDEA of a double-click cannot be patented. This is surely NOT what Ben Franklin and the rest had in mind with the idea of patents.

Surely the result of any such action is specifically identified in a patent, i.e. A triple click could be used to do something other than what any patent covers without infringement.

Which is precisely what is wrong with this patent. There are probably an infinite number of distinctly different things one could do with a double click. Interact with a an active display element? That should cover pretty much everything. Right?

Since this was invented by Xerox way before 2002 this had better be thrown out. ...

Actually, no. Xerox used a three button mouse.

Jobs thought that three buttons would be confusing, especially to new users. He decided Lisa would sport a one button mouse. He tasked the Lisa team with coming up with a way to do everything with a one button mouse. One of the things they came up with was the double-click. Lisa was released in 1983.

Double-tapping on a screen to change a view, or to interact with content, or initiate some other action was part of Newton 2.0 interface programming circa 1996.

For example, a Newton user could double tap a blank space to bring up the keyboard; a double or triple tap could scroll items in a "list picker," or double tapping a word, misrecognized by Newton's handwriting recognizer, would bring pop up a list of possible corrections.